Design and Art Australia Online

Architect and artist José Garcia Negrette was born of a French mother and Spanish father in Cuba in 1956 before settling in Sydney in 1969. He attended South Sydney Boys’ High School under Colleen Quinn, who was his art teacher before he studied architecture at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), graduating with Honours Class I in 1983. After a few months travelling around Japan, Europe and the United States of America, he returned to work as an architect, eventually forming his own company, Garcia Negrette Architecture & Design Pty Ltd, whose designs include museums, residential and commercial projects. Garcia Negrette is also a freelance lecturer in the Raffles College of Design and Commerce (also known as the KVB Institute of Technology) and the Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW.

While studying architecture, Garcia Negrette enjoyed drawing, painting, and graphic design, the latter leading to a series of interpretive drawings of the Sydney Opera House. By the mid-1980s he was successfully publishing cartoons in the Sydney Morning Herald, with one of them eventually being published in the book Arrest that cartoonist! (Considine, Mary-Lou, 1986). Garcia Negrette regards his cartooning, painting and drawing as energising activities that complement the running of an architectural practice.

Garcia Negrette’s paintings on paper, often a combination of abstracted figures and landscapes, typically investigate the layering of pencil or sometimes pastel drawings with bands of saturated pigments in acrylic, to capture his emotional response to the subject. In so doing, he invites the viewer to look attentively at the surface qualities. His art has been exhibited in various group exhibitions in Sydney, including exhibitions at the Bondi Pavilion Gallery and the S.H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery. Having contributed as one of over twenty artists to “The Soul of the Architect” exhibition at Mary Place Gallery, Paddington, in 2005, he returned in 2008 for a two-person show, “1 + 1 = DOS”, with fellow architect-painter, Danielle Pinet.

Garcia Negrette has designed furniture both for his own use and for clients, with some images of his work published in Belle Corporate Design and Vogue Living. In 2008 Garcia Negrette was living with his wife and daughter in Sydney.

Writers:

De Lorenzo, Dr Catherine Note:
Chow, Yee Ling Note:

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2008

Status:

peer-reviewed